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Architecturally, a keystone is the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place. Without the keystone, the building blocks of an archway will tumble and fall, with no support system for the weight of the arch. Much of the United States climate movement right now is structured like an archway, with all of its blocks resting on a keystone — President Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.

This is a dangerous place to be. Once Barack Obama makes his decision on the pipeline, be it approval or rejection, the keystone will disappear. Without this piece, we could see the weight of the arch tumble down, potentially losing throngs of newly inspired climate activists. As members of Rising Tide North America, a continental network of grassroots groups taking direct action and finding community-based solutions to the root causes of the climate crisis, we believe that to build the climate justice movement we need, we can have no keystone — no singular solution, campaign, project, or decision maker.

The Keystone XL fight was constructed around picking one proposed project to focus on with a clear elected decider, who had campaigned on addressing climate change. The strategy of DC-focused green groups has been to pressure President Obama to say “no” to Keystone by raising as many controversies as possible about the pipeline and by bringing increased scrutiny to Keystone XL through arrestable demonstrations. Similarly, in Canada, the fight over Enbridge’s Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline has unfolded in much the same way, with green groups appealing to politicians to reject Northern Gateway.

However, the mainstream Keystone XL and Northern Gateway campaigns operate on a flawed assumption that the climate movement can compel our elected leaders to respond to the climate crisis with nothing more than an effective communications strategy. Mainstream political parties in both the US and Canada are tied to and dependent on the fossil fuel industry and corporate capitalism. As seen in similar campaigns in 2009 to pass a climate bill in the United States and to ratify an international climate treaty in Copenhagen, the system is rigged against us. Putting Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the keystone of the archway creates a flawed narrative that if we, as grassroots groups, work hard enough to stack the building blocks correctly to support them, then elected officials will do what we want. Social change happens when local communities lead, and only then will politicians follow. While we must name and acknowledge power holders like Obama, our movement must empower local communities to make decisions and take action on the causes of the climate crisis in their backyards.

Because of the assumption that the climate movement can trust even “sympathetic” politicians like Obama, these campaigns rely on lifting up one project above all else. Certain language used has made it seem like Keystone XL is an extreme project, with unusual fraud and other injustices associated with it. Indeed the Keystone XL project is extreme and unjust, as is everyfossil fuel project and every piece of the extraction economy. While, for example, the conflict of interests between the State Department, TransCanada and Environmental Resources Management in the United States, and Enbridge and federal politicians in Canada, must be publicized, it should be clear that this government/industry relationship is the norm, not the exception.

The “game over for climate” narrative is also problematic. With both the Keystone and Northern Gateway campaigns, it automatically sets up a hierarchy of projects and extractive types that will inevitably pit communities against each other. Our movement can never question if Keystone XL is worse than Flanagan South (an Enbridge pipeline running from Illinois to Oklahoma), or whether tar sands, fracking or mountaintop removal coal mining is worse. We must reject all these forms of extreme energy for their effects on the climate and the injustices they bring to the people at every stage of the extraction process. Our work must be broad so as to connect fights across the continent into a movement that truly addresses the root causes of social, economic, and climate injustice. We must call for what we really need — the end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction. The pipeline placed yesterday in British Columbia, the most recent drag lines added in Wyoming, and the fracking wells built in Pennsylvania need to be the last ones ever built. And we should say that.

This narrative has additionally set up a make-or-break attitude about these pipeline fights that risks that the movement will contract and lose people regardless of the decision on them. The Keystone XL and Northern Gateway fights have engaged hundreds of thousands of people, with many embracing direct action and civil disobedience tactics for the first time. This escalation and level of engagement is inspiring. But the absolutist “game over” language chances to lose many of them. If Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline, what’s to stop many from thinking that this is in fact “game over” for the climate? And if Obama rejects Keystone XL, what’s to stop many from thinking that the climate crisis is therefore solved? We need those using the “game over” rhetoric to lay out the climate crisis’ root causes — because just as one project is not the end of humanity, stopping one project will not stop runaway climate change.

The fights over Keystone XL and Northern Gateway have been undoubtedly inspiring. We are seeing the beginnings of the escalation necessary to end extreme energy extraction, stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis, and make a just transition to equitable societies. Grassroots groups engaging in and training for direct action such as the Tar Sands Blockade, Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, the Unist’ot’en Camp, and Moccasins on the Ground have shown us how direct action can empower local communities and push establishment green groups to embrace bolder tactics. Our movement is indeed growing, and people are willing to put their bodies on the line; an April poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found one in eight Americans would engage in civil disobedience around global warming.

However, before the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway mainstream campaigns come to an end, we all must recognize the dangers of having an archway approach to movement building. It is the danger of relying on political power-holders, cutting too narrow campaigns, excluding a systemic analysis of root causes, and, ultimately, failing to create a broad-based movement. We must begin to discuss and develop our steps on how we should shift our strategy, realign priorities, escalate direct action, support local groups and campaigns, and keep as many new activists involved as possible.

We are up against the world’s largest corporations, who are attempting to extract, transport and burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate, all as the climate crisis spins out of control. The climate justice movement should have no keystone because we must match them everywhere they are — and they are everywhere. To match them, we need a movement of communities all across the continent and the world taking direct action to stop the extraction industry, finding community-based solutions, and addressing the root causes of the climate crisis.

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Arielle Klagsbrun is an organizer with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment and Rising Tide North America, and is a 2013 Brower Youth Award winner. David Osborn is climate organizer with Portland Rising Tide and Rising Tide North America. He is also a faculty member at Portland State University. Maryam Adrangi is a campaigner with the Council of Canadians and an organizer with Rising Tide Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. Kirby Spangler works with the Castle Mountain Coalition and Alaska Rising Ride.

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22 comments

Interesting that this article doesn’t mention the divestment campaign, or escalating fracking campaigns across the country — two crucial, widespread and effective parts in the climate fight that have grown tremendously since the focus on Keystone XL began. I think those are the strongest counterpoints to the central thesis here.

Though I want to also add that this is a worthwhile discussion to be having and this article is a measured and useful approach to it.

I will say that the progress that has been made on Keystone (I think) contributes to a movement pushing a ‘no fossil fuels anywhere’ more than any other campaign so far, and we’ll need to continue it, win OR lose.

Great article, and really appreciate the discourse. I think there are a couple really vital points raised in this – and agree the “Game Over” messaging can create hierarchies in struggle. I think it’s a fine line movements must walk – there’s a degree of privilege in being able to “choose” what campaigns or issues to focus on. But there’s also the reality that there are causes/effects in the world, and that we (at least many of us) think that social movements should be aiming for winning and changing material conditions in our world, not merely to hold a moral high ground, or endlessly struggle with little fruit to show for it.

I would argue the climate (and broader environmental movement of recent decades) has lacked much overarching strategy, and we have understandably little to show for it. We’ve engaged on campaigns for many reasons – from funders pushing NGO’s where to go, to people fighting the problems in their backyard, to activists drawn to actions based on a cultural or lifestyle aesthetics.

“Death by 1,000 cuts” isn’t really working. The NoKXL campaigns and actions has been hugely successful because it focused a lot of movement energy (at all levels) around a common effort. I don’t see the success of NoKXL being simply about “is the pipeline stopped or not” – but rather: Has that focusing greatly strengthened the movement across the board? Inspired more people to join us in collective action? Built leadership and engagement for people to come off the sidelines? Created greater urgency in our campaigns? Expanded relationships across cultures? Supported frontline communities and amplified their stories, voices, issues, and power? Helped break down stigmas and fear around direct action? And built power for the grassroots?

I’d argue it’s done all of these things to varying degrees, dare I say moreso than any other point in the North American climate movements’ history. And that these things have been built not just to stop KXL, but for the entire movement: from those fighting Tar Sands on indigenous lands, to fracking wells in their backyards, to power plants that are being retired and much more.

Really great points, Matt. Thanks for sharing. I’m reminded of an article Eileen Flanagan wrote for this site about the importance and meaning she found in her small anti-MTR Quaker action group taking part in the Climate Forward rally:

George Lakey, one of EQAT’s founders and a columnist for Waging Nonviolence, argues that being able to reach people who don’t think of themselves as activists is one of the main reasons to organize for a national march. “When we talk about the threat, we tend to make it very large — the fossil fuel industry — and we are very small,” he said. “We need to have the experience of being the many.” Only when people see that our support is proportionate to the size of the problem will they want to join us. “Small groups need to affiliate with larger actions in order to build our own credibility about being part of a movement large enough to tackle larger problems,” he added, while noting that it is always a matter of balance to decide what to mobilize for and how often.

The idea that “We need to have the experience of being many” makes a lot of sense to me. Having been to so many small actions over the years, it is refreshing and invigorating to be a part of something like the NoKXL campaigns. And it seems like a lot of smaller/local campaigns are feeding off that energy. It’s my sense that the relationship between big national campaigns and small local campaigns is symbiotic, or at least can be. And when that’s the case, movements are in a real position to grow, and gain the kind of numbers needed for serious transformative victories.

Just as Environmentalists need to focus on more than a single project or politician or policy, so they need to observe that their cause is connected to a larger cause, the struggle to move beyond capitalism. Capitalism is necessarily based on domination, exploitation and extraction, which when applied to the non-human ‘natural’ world leads to degradation and decay. Stopping one destructive project or industry is not enough; we need to think about replacing the whole system which promotes that destruction.

For me and likely most, the Tarsands/keystoneXL is just a bridge to get to the next field to be saved. If we can’t get across this bridge the endless addiction will not be curtailed and they will just get one big or the biggest gift handed them.

“Mainstream political parties in both the US and Canada are tied to and dependent on the fossil fuel industry and corporate capitalism.”

Yes, they’ve shown themselves to be just that. Which is the main reason I think we should not put all of our activist eggs in a conventional political basket. By which I mean — efforts to get elected “representatives” to “represent” our values or agendas.

Some, but by no means all, of our efforts to address the climate emergency should be “conventionally political” as defined above. That is, some energy should go to attempting to get policy changes in government. But at least as much energy should be put into a profoundly, radically direct action approach. By which I mean that we go about directly creating a world which requires and uses a dramatically lower level of carbon fuels.

Here I’m not talking simply about “lifestyle changes” on a purely individual level. These are fine, too. But the pervasive criticism of this approach has many valid points. What’s needed is the creation of community-based and community level grassroots engagements akin to Rob Hopkins inspired Transition movement, the ecovillage movement, etc.

In other words, resistance isn’t enough. It’s necessary, true. But we’ve also got to get beyond the negative framing of resistance, opposition, “the fight”…, which poses “the enemy” as the fossil fuel industry. Were that it were so simple! In actuality, most of us in the so-called “developed world” are willingly and directly supporting this “enemy” each day — by burning the fuels they happily sell to us.

The great collaborative and collective creative challenge we have before us is to build and/or retrofit a new physical and social culture which doesn’t require such complicity.

Not defeating the KestoneXL after the president winked at the southern leg would be more endless delay and deceit which plays well to the ALL OF THE ABOVE policy which in the final analysis gives us massive cancers and asthma for the children downstream of cleaning and in Houston area that we could not take a final stand for. Not to mention by the time we do the earth is burning the 4 times more than we can of carbon.

I believe the keystone fight is a real one but also a very symbolic one. Obviously tackling everything at one time is impossible. It’s good to have something so “business as usual, screw the people” get disrupted and re-evaluated.

Maybe the next thing folks move to is the “divest from fossil fuels” movement. That also is symbolic, but it disempowers those corporations, makes them look filthy and covers all carbon forms of energy.

“Maybe the next thing folks move to is the “divest from fossil fuels” movement. That also is symbolic, but it disempowers those corporations, makes them look filthy and covers all carbon forms of energy.”

True enough, but the best hope we have is to begin to build a way of life and a physical culture and infrastructure which doen’t require burning fossil fuels. Of what use will it be to “divest” while we go on burning massive amounts of fossil fuels through automobile dependency, air travel, overconsumption, coal fired home heating (at a distant plant)…?

We should (e.g.) retrofit our houses for solar heating, walk or bicycle more, use public transport more, etc…. Trying to force corporations or government to change can only go so far, and we’re going to have to create changes on the personal and local community level anyway.

I’m not exactly clear as to how to connect all of the dots to get community level responsiveness up and happening, but it’s a problem we need to brainstorm together. And there needn’t be “a way”. We might need to try many, many ways. See what works.

I agree with the last sentence. One thing seems certain: we will have to move beyond institutions based on domination, exploitation, and repression, that is, away from the capitalist state. I suggest thinking about — and doing something about — institutions and relations based on cooperation and non-violence, for instance moving out money from banks to credit unions (as an example of a not very radical first step). You don’t have to overthrow the ruling class; you just have to make it irrelevant.

This article by Rising Tide folks raises great strategy questions. I work with a local/regional climate justice group called Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT pronounced like “equate”). We wage a direct action campaign in the Middle Atlantic States as an ally of the Appalachian people who resist mountaintop removal coal mining. We’ve also, in a modest way, tied in with the national movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, like coordinating for the Philly-area the Pledge of Resistance and conducting trainings.

Why both? Because as important as our local work is, we do find more people are attracted to us when we show we can cooperate with sisters and brothers nationally in tackling something that’s way to big for local groups to handle. Mass movements build through cooperation, not division, and it takes mass movements to win the degree of change that the article rightly points out as required.

We also don’t see a built-in contradiction between changing our lives and doing direct action. The Quaker building where we meet has, after major effort, gone carbon neutral. As much as I like the radicalness of the article’s analysis, I believe there’s too much either/or when it gets to strategy.

I’m old enough to have participated in the civil rights movement, which was where I was first arrested, and I believe for all its limitations that movement has some strategic hints for us today. One is that when we do it right, the national builds the local, and the local builds the national. Check out my Waging Nonviolence column from Oct 23, 2012, “How to create a multi-level movement for climate justice,” where I show how brilliantly Bayard Rustin worked the levels so everything was feeding everything else instead of detracting. I understand the danger that Rising Tide is pointing to, including the danger of pinning hopes on politicians, but there was a decade in there when the civil rights movement used a multi-level strategy to empower local folks AND make gains nationally. That model might inspire us to design a multi-level movement that works in our day.

“We also don’t see a built-in contradiction between changing our lives and doing direct action.”

Nor do I. In fact, the phrase “direct action” refers to at least two distinct but often complementary things. One is resistance in the form of blockades and such, or in the form of conventionally political engagement of the civil disobedience sort. Etc. Where the aim is to stop others from doing X.

The other major form of direct action is the opposite of resistance as stopping others from doing X. It is doing Y, or Z. Usually in an organized way, with others.

We need both approaches. But, so far, organized climate crisis response has mostly been geared toward resistance, toward opposition to an enemy. It is, a “fight” more than a “struggle”. And I want to encourage us to struggle, also. And the struggle we need, it seems, is oriented toward directly creating a very low carbon intensity culture and economy (a “lifeway”). Which I think we need to imagine and create together, collaboratively and non-violently.

David Graeber, in The White Review, said about direct action:

“Direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free.

The classic example is the well. There’s a town where water is monopolised and the mayor is in bed with the company that monopolises the water. If you were to protest in front of the mayor’s house, that’s protest, and if you were to blockade the mayor’s house, it’s civil disobedience, but it’s still not direct action. Direct action is when you just go and dig your own well, because that’s what people would normally do if they didn’t have water.”

How would people live if they didn’t have coal, oil and natural gas? Do we need to ask the government’s permission to begin building a world without these?

And if our resitance to the fossil fuel culture and economy were to succeed, how will we clothe, shelter and feed ourselves? Need we wait until resistance has succeeded to begin to create such an economy and culture?

Thank you to everyone for your comments on the article. As one of the authors I wanted to add some of my thoughts and participate in the conversation. And I should stress that this is what I want to encourage more then anything, a conversation about movement strategies among movement participants (including but not limited to NGO staff) that truly confront the root causes of the climate crisis.

I would put myself squarely with Matt that “social movements must be aiming and winning and changing material conditions in our world” and I believe this piece reflects that. Our argument is not that the KXL/North Gateway campaigns were without successes, they clearly accomplished a great deal. I appreciate the work of both paid and volunteer organizers in the various aspects of these campaigns. In our analysis we also do not want to focus our gaze backwards, but rather ahead. In looking at how these campaigns were structured what can inform movement strategy going forward? In the above article you can see our reflections about what some of our lessons are. One point I want to reiterate here is that we need greater care in how we position ourselves in terms of making demands from politicians so as to move beyond liberal, Democrat-centered theories of change to those anchored in building community power. We need to figure out how to better organize in a way that centers political power in communities and allows for greater expansion of analysis in addition to tactics (the latter of which organizing related to KXL does deserve respect for expanding).

This connects to the comments of George Lakey, which I very much appreciated, and I want to stress that we need both/and approaches. However, we also need to make sure that we pursue synergy in our approaches. In the critique above I don’t think we are arguing that there shouldn’t be national campaigns, indeed we need them. The critique above suggests ways in which we might revise future national infrastructure-specific campaigns to (1) always connect to the diversity of other fossil fuel fights, (2) center power – even and especially if targeting politicians – in communities not those individuals elected into political office, (3) expand the demand to include stopping all new fossil fuel infrastructure, not just the project in question. Though I lack the depth of perspective that George has regarding the civil rights movement, my understanding is that there were not campaigns that targeted a politician in the way in which green NGOs chose to target Obama. George’s article, “How to create a multi-level movement for climate justice”, illuminates a historical example of what national movement building might look like and the form targeting politicians should take. In his description, Martin Luther King Jr.’s response to President Kennedy’s refusal to take action on civil rights was not to target Kennedy directly. Rather the action was taken to Birmingham and the segregation that existed there. In other words directly to the sites of injustice and the communities that were both impacted by them and which could be empowered to challenge them. My guess is that this approach was both more powerful in cultivating a radical analysis and sense of agency among participants and in putting pressure on the politician from whom they wanted to extract changes – hence the header of that section “To impact Washington, go to Birmingham”. Though the issues and historical context are very different there is much to extract here. Within the climate movement we can most powerfully activate people, support the development a radical analysis about the climate crisis, facilitate the emergence of local leadership and influence power holders by taking the fight to where it is most real – where drag lines dig up coal, banks work to finance extraction, fracking wells inject poisons into the earth, CEOs make decisions in corporate board rooms, export terminals begin construction, companies build extraction equipment, power plants burn coal, etc.

I was excited to see these comments raised in response to our article and I think that the more movement participants engage some of the excellent questions posed by Matt, George and others the stronger our movements will be. I also think that these strategic conversations should increasingly be grounded in the communities impacted and organizing around the climate crisis. I look forward to continuing to participate in this conversation going forward.

Because world food security is likely to be among the first serious direct impacts in human lives, I’d propose taking this matter into considerations of strategies and tactics. One way to consider this might be to point out that most of the world’s people depend on industrial agriculture and a market food economy, rather than, say, community self provisioning. It being a global food market, access to food in a global famine will decline most impactfully among the economically disadvantaged. As such access will be decided by money rather than, say, access to fertile land, water, and tools.

Climate justice thus conjoins with economic justice — in the direction of facilitation of community self-provisioning of food. By which I mean, assiting the economically marginalized in gaining access to the capacity to meet their own food needs directly and outside of the market.

I think this sort of activity is needed both in the so-called “developed world” as much as the so-called “underdeveloped world,” since the globalized market economy is now about as irresilient as the ecosystemic support of food security.

With Alaskan and Siberian peat bogs beginning to melt and methane and CO2 increasingly being released from land and water — clathrates and peat (etc.) –, we’re actually much nearer to (if not beyond) tipping points into runaway catastrophe than most realize.

This is all about so much more than, say, coastal sea level rises, or prolonged (or unending) droughts … or even the death of some forests or risk to many species….

Maybe, maybe… if we make profound changes very fast there can be a future for complex life on this beautiful planet. Maybe, maybe … humans will survive as a species.

But this is not about a pipeline. It’s about sanity. It’s about survival.

And sanity and survival require us to UTTERLY, DRAMATICALLY refuse, reject and replace our carbon intensive economy (lifeway) with a very, very low carbon economy and lifeway. And the time to begin to take this very seriously is this very moment. No delay is possible. We’ve used up whatever wiggle room there had once been. We’re in an emergency, folks!

This is going to take a lot of heart, a lot of love, a lot of creativity and intelligence. And passion. And commitment.

I think this is a healthy article reminding that much more needs to be done beyond keystone fight. However, keystone XL fight is quite important and it has already produced the following results:

1) It has increased the cost of the original project which was the most economical route, by forcing the route to change and the delay of multiple years which previously Transcanada took for granted. Another reason for increase in their cost is they had to spend money to advertise more in response to the resistance and still did not get any result.

2) It most likely has made the fossil fuel companies that are charting big projects to start taking into account the potential cost due to public resistance and spend even more on PR, which either make them uneconomical (unworthy of development or rather destruction) and/or make the resulting fuel produced more expensive.

3) It has increased awareness of climate change problem and has reached closer to the goal of critical mass needed for the movement. It has tried to connect the dots of increasing climate change effects experienced by people with the dirty fuels. Due to increase in general awareness, it has probably also made people question their habits of fossil fuel consumption.

4) It has inspired action on other fights (fracking) and local activism.

Important thing to note is that the “free market” is starting to reflect the increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction because of public resistance, a carbon tax essentially, due to moral action. The goal is to induce “moral peak fossil energy” hopefully much earlier than the geologically induced peak happens.

While taking on smaller scale fossil fights is important, it is probably even more important to take on the bigger scale fights like keystone because the “return on investment” (the increase in cost to the projects and movement build-up per man-hours invested in resistance) is likely to be high for the large scale projects. Yes, I am talking in economic terms more here than moral terms, but this is the language the world of business understands and it is unregulated business that drives these projects. Divestment is the other part of the equation, but it needs to go beyond universities and government funds.

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